La Cienega

William Padien’s paintings conjure up a child’s jigsaw puzzle of idiosyncratic color, simple shape and odd points of view. His best work puts one in mind of Milton Avery.

In “Mast Barn,” the building is a bundle of dark red strokes that let you glimpse chinks of blue sky. The surrounding field is gray, forced over an undercoat of black and sealed off by an opaque green hedge. Below, a bit of yellow--an edge of cornfield, perhaps--pokes into view. In “Bluff,” Padien does nifty things with a tentacled spread of green over a yellow-gray hill. Eddying movements of the brush pattern the vast gray-over-blue sky in “July Morning,” which presides over horizontal color slices of terrain.

When Padien goes off course in his larger works, it’s usually because he trusts color too much and loosens his grip on form. But the tiny paintings he does (some on shaped paper) might be meditations on the way certain abstract conjunctions of color can be read as landscape. His sets of paint-obliterated scenic postcards seem sophomoric, however, and unworthy of an essentially lyrical sensibility. (Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Ave., to June 13.)